Oh, this pisses me off..

[gridlore]

One of the more annoying people on the Traveller Mailing List has begun editing quotes to meet his standards. Not just fixing spelling and punctuation errors, which is annoying enough, but wholesale changing of things like sentence structure and units of measurement.

Everyone has asked him, in increasingly strident tones, to please stop this, and he simply expresses amazement that anyone would be bothered by his editing, and that he has every "right" to change things and then represent it as a quote.

I am reaching the point of plonking the guy. He has pissed me off before, and is a right-wing moron whose views are strident to the point of solipsism. He's always right, and what he likes is of course what is best for all of us. But what gets me is that in the face of no support at all, he continues to contend that he is right.

Comments

[bunyip.livejournal.com]

He's such an incredible moron that he makes normal morons seem intelligent.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

I am reaching the point of plonking the guy.

<AOL>me too<AOL>. I've even changed from digest to single-message, for the very first time, in preparation for possibly having to take that step.

God save us from contrarians who mistake that quality for free-thinking individualism.

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

Please excuse my brainless state, but I can't figure out who you are on the TML.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Sorry. Kelly St.Clair here, the same guy who asked you a few months back if you wanted to be in a story. (Despite your recommendation, you were not killed therein.)

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

OK, coolness. I've added you to my friends list.

Not killed, hm? Oh, well.. there's always the sequel.

[johno.livejournal.com]

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<his [...] clarity,>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

<his quote - reedited for clarity, grammer, spelling, etc>
Something completing different from what he said.
</his quote>

See what he does then.

Metric to Imperial???? -- Didn't we loose a space probe due to that?

[twfarlan.livejournal.com]

That's a good idea; try misquoting him once or twice, see how he likes it. When he bitches about that not being what he said, tell him, "Ah, but I was only doing what you always do to the rest of us, misquoting. A quote, to be useful, isn't what you want someone to have said, it's EXACTLY AND ACTUALLY WHAT THEY REALLY SAID, dammit!"

Or something to that effect. Me, I'd just have plonked the guy the first time he did that and claimed he didn't see what was wrong with it. I have no tolerance for several things, plagarism being one, hypocrisy another, and deliberate quote fraud another.

[isomeme.livejournal.com]

The problem is that every single person who holds their own against universal disapproval thinks they are Martin Luther King, or Galileo, or Socrates. And, indeed, 0.00001% of horribly annoying troublemakers are in fact visionary geniuses whom we are not yet ready to accept.

Of course, the horribly annoying troublemakers all think they are on the short side of those odds, while in point of fact 99.99999% of them are merely jerks.

[twfarlan.livejournal.com]

Yes, perhaps... but a right-wing, conservative visionary? What are the chances of THAT? I mean, how would that even WORK? ;)

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

He doesn't claim to be a visionary; rather, for example, he sees no reason to replace one set of arbitrary measurements (Imperial) for another equally arbitrary one (metric) which offers him no significant increase in utility in his daily life, and is in fact less useful because he doesn't think in such terms and would have to learn a new system.

His other arguments regarding grammar, style etc. seem to confirm this mindset: "This is the way I learned it years ago, when I was a lad, and since no one has proved to me that these newfangled ways are better, I will insist that everyone Should be doing it the Correct way."

[FYI, the above is not a quote.]

[twfarlan.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't figure he was claiming to be a visionary. Just the thought of one was boggling enough.

Ah. "I do it this way, so that must be the correct way because if it wasn't correct, I wouldn't be doing it." A most faulty beginning for anything, indeed.
Plonk him. Ignore him, he's not going to change.